April 24, 2004

Oh, Hell, I'm Gloating

It's only April, but bear in mind the nascent leaves now bursting from branches above you are the same ones that will shade you in July and technicolor your world in October. --Ed

It took a few seconds to fully comprehend what was happening, to understand what was tumbling out of the angry grandstands. The game was already out of hand. The Red Sox had seen to that by battering Jose Contreras, by butchering Donovan Osborne, and by soon bloodying Scott Proctor. They could've gotten themselves a 10-run mercy rule win, if the law allowed.
That wasn't so astonishing. The Red Sox have beaten up the Yankees before. They've even won their fair share of lopsided games inside Yankee Stadium before. These things happen. These things have happened.

Then came something that almost never happens:

Derek Jeter took ball one off Derek Lowe, leading off the home sixth, the Yankees already behind 7-0. He took strike one. He took strike two. And then flailed helplessly as strike three. Again: no new ground here. No virgin territory. Before swatting air this time, Jeter had already struck out 882 times as a major leaguer. Some of them had even come at Yankee Stadium.

None of them had ever been accompanied by the following commentary:

"Boooooooooooooooo!"

"Boooooooooooooooo!"--"It's This Bad: Jeter Booed!" by Mike Vaccaro, New York Post

I can never understand how Sox fans feel, but all I know is that I'd much rather earn it by beating the best teams then to be handed it because "it's about time". That would take away from the championship IMO. And everytime the Yanks take a division title, a league title, and a championship, I savor and appreciate it as long as possible. It's not easy to do and knowing the run I went through when I first became a Yankee fan, I remember what it was like to come so close and lose it, and the more painfull end of it with having no chance at all, there is no way in hell I'd be content. Who knows how long the Yanks are going to be as good as they are. It could end at any time. --Hitman23 on the experiment at NYYFans.com

Meanwhile, the NFL Draft takes place today. I expect the Patriots will pad their dynasty.

The downside: I have to listen to Michael Irvin talk, and hear him talk about Eli Manning, a double-whammy if there ever was one.

For the record, Eli Manning is a whiny little bitch. I hope the Chargers do draft him, and sit his punk ass on the bench just like he's talked about. That way, he doesn't play football and nobody's happy--then maybe he'll realize what a total dickwad (yes, I did just say dickwad) he's being.

But that probably won't happen. Because Manning's asshole quotient is obviously genetic, and bigger than all of us.

So, barring that, I just can't wait till the Patriots play whatever team Young Manning goes to, so we can boo the piss out of them at Gillette, and so Tom Brady can show him firsthand what it's like to be a man.

April 23, 2004

What Would a Yankee Fan Do?

I know me saying that is a little bit like Jews for Jesus, but hear me out.

Some of you may know that I have been conducting an experiment over at NYYfans.com lately, to get to the bottom of why it is that the Yankees would--as they seem to--dislike the Red Sox.

"Until now, my general impression was that the hatred was one-sided, traveling north-to-south on I-95," I said.

But lately...I've seen that Yankees fans appear to hate us right back.

I'm not looking to pick a fight. I seriously, sincerely want to know what it is Yankees fans have to hate about the Sox and Sox fans. If we hate your team, it's because you win all the time. Why would that bother you? If we hate your owner, it's because he has the most money. Why would that bother you?

I got some interesting replies. "Let's say you get in a fight after school every day with the same person," said user Stupid Flanders.

You fight hard, and well, and you just barely manage to win every time, but you're bruised and bloodied. You enjoy the victory, but does that mean because you won you should love your opponent?

The truth of the matter is that the Yankees and the Red Sox have finished in first and second place, respectively, for the last six consecutive seasons, the only such streak of finishes, The Rem-Dogin any sport in the history of organized professional games. So it's only natural if it gets a bit like that picture, I guess, of the pelican and the bullfrog, where the pelican is trying to swallow the bullfrog and the bullfrog is strangling the pelican.

And debating which is the better opponent is useless.

As time went on and I visited periodically to check the petri dish, I have to say the Yanks fans really enlightened me in one way with their responses on this thread. Time and again, their comment on Red Sox fans was that, as GoRocket put it, "(they) seem to care more about the Yanks losing than the Sox winning."

"I have a lot of friends who are Sox fans and we get along just fine," said patrick.o. "I also know plenty of people who claim to be Sox fans but are Yankees haters much more than they are Sox fans, and I have no use for their verbal diharrea."

Fair enough.

Ed has begun a campaign this year to bring about more positive thinking on the part of Sox fans. Much of this has little to do with the Yankees, and more about visualizing the positives in a given situation. If Francona doesn't take Schilling out, instead of dreading the grand slam, we should picture a K. It can't hurt, right?

And if there's one thing that intelligent Yankees fans are good for, it's as an example of the kind of confidence we're trying to achieve with that method.

Example: The Sox are, as I type this, on their way to an 11-2 rout of the Yankees on their first trip back to Yankee Stadium since the fateful night of Oct. 16. I have to admit I was doing some serious gloating as D-Lowe threw six scoreless innings, Contreras gave up back-to-back homers, and then, in a show of poetic justice, it began to rain on them for good measure.

It's difficult to escape this engrained habit of hatred. It's hard to break the habit of taking petty pleasure in the misfortunes of others. And I'll admit, I'll be the first to talk some serious potty-mouthed smack about Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada, who I think I'll always, how you say, dislike strongly.

However. It's one thing to want to beat the Yankees. The rivalry is what makes our team special. But maybe we need to take an example from the fans on the opposing side in terms of their attitude toward the game.

You have to admit it's a little sick to sit and savor an 11-2 victory in April. That's what a Yankees fan will tell you. They'll say, as they put it over on the thread, "The Red Sox are like Daylight Savings Time--spring forward and fall back."

Of course, if the Sox were losing 11-2, the Yankees fans would be saying, "See, look at that. We clearly still have the better team."

But hey. No one said it had to make sense.

Thing is, we slip into our roles so easily--the sky was falling after Francona's Grady-gaffe last night in Boston. Meanwhile, the Sox have already taken 4 out of 5 in the season series with the Yankees, but confidence still reigns in New York.

Boston waits for the other shoe to drop, and New York just waits.

If we want to "reverse the curse", we need to reverse these roles. We need to take both wins and losses more in stride. I'm not saying I've been successful in that yet, but from now on, I'm going to try.

So, tonight as Timlin struck out a Yankee as the rain still fell and as Manny blasted a homer to put the score on the Sox side up to 11, I thought to myself, what would a Yankee fan do?

So that's exactly what I did. I put the TV on, sure, in the background, but I came down here and wrote this blog entry instead of hanging on every pitch as if it were October already--as if I were just another bitter Red Sox fan.

April 22, 2004

If they don't win it's a shame

Okay, put away the brooms, and get out your finger cymbals. It's time to meditate.

In case it hasn't gotten across, the Yankees are still doing worse than we are. They came back against the White Sox earlier this week, but not tonight, but not before getting shelled in their first series against them, and not before dropping three of the first four to the Sox. Did Yankees fans despair?

The fact is that winning teams, and winning fans (as with last season's Sox) don't throw in the towel when things like this happen. They find their Zen, remind themselves that it's only April, and move on.

This loss is a gift. Hear me out. This loss is a gift. The blessing is that it comes in April, not October. The blessing is that there are more games to be played. The blessing is that Francona is in for the shitstorm of his life after not only his first full-fledged fuck-up as manager, but the exact fuck-up everyone's been dreading.

Isn't it great it's already out of the way?

Things could not be more simple. The offense needs to start hitting. The manager needs to manage the pitchers better. We have 150 games in which to do just that.

Curt Schilling is a professional with a long history including a World Series ring and an MVP. Pedro Martinez is still the best pitcher in baseball. Wake is a deadly threat. For the first time in franchise history, we have a rock-solid bullpen coming out of the gate. We've won the majority of games so far, and still won the series against Toronto. To be an above-.500 club without two of our offensive stars, while a new manager and a number of new players are still settling into the madhouse that is baseball in Boston is nothing to be looked down upon.

I'm not saying we shouldn't expect our team to win. Tonight was a tough loss, to be sure. But we need to realize that despite the deja-vu defeat, we are winning, the sky is not falling, and all is still right with the world.

Get Out the Broom

"So. You're the Toronto Blue Jays. You're 0 for 8 in every home game you've played in this season. You're 0 for 2 in the series. You are desperate to find some way to get batters on your lineup on base. And tonight's starting pitcher for Boston will be...Curt Schilling.

Have a nice day." --Bob Numier, this morning on WEEI

So of course tonight when my man pitches, once again I won't be able to watch the game.

I'm starting to think maybe it'd be a jinx for me to watch, given that I haven't been able to sit down and see one of his starts yet.

What the Foulke?

The Sox are in first place today, thanks to a Baltimore loss, and in spite of the fact that they are short-handed and still seem to be making some serious mental lapses on the field.

Surprise: not everyone is happy. According to Hench's Hardball over at BDD:

How the hell do the Red Sox repeatedly drift into vapor lock in critical games against the team we most need to beat? In the span of 11 months, just off the top of my head, the Sox have had four separate outfielders lose track of the number of outs. Two of them have done it twice. And it is always excused and laughed off as "just one of those things." Well, it’s "just one of those things" that should never happen and might cost us the game that keeps us out of the playoffs.

Though he has a point somewhere in there, Hench is a real gloom and doomer--his previous column was a veritable classic of Chicken-Little thinking:

But this year is different. You see, in 2002 and 2003 I had very high hopes that felt dashed on Opening Day. This year the opener just confirmed what I've suspected ever since The Deal not only fell through but became the The Tom Hicks Subsidizes the Yankees with the Blessing of Bud Selig Deal: the Sox are a flawed, fragile, petulant team that can't hang with either the Yankees or the Angels.

It's not that I'm blase. It's that I'm more from the Zen school of thought with respect to human fallibility. For example, had not Kapler so embarrassed himself with forgetting how many outs there were in that inning against the Yankees Monday, and had he not had such a strong desire to vindicate himself in front of his teammates, would he have had the wherewithal to hit the clutch single that brought in the winning run?

This is why I love Ed.

Ultimately, though, Red Sox Nation seems to put itself in a hopeless bind each season: not only do we expect our team to win it all, but we expect them to be perfect in doing so. We expect every game to be a textbook example of baseball, out after out, pitch after pitch. We expect every hitter to step to the plate and blast out a base hit, every single game. We expect every pitch Pedro throws to be a called third strike on a nasty changeup.

Sometimes I think we get so lost in this insatiable need for perfection that we lose sight of the ultimate goal: winning it all. And you need look no further than Foxboro, Massachusetts for evidence that, as my mother likes to say, "done is better than perfect."

The Patriots played ugly football--but they played it better than everyone. Peyton Manning, on the other hand, played beautiful football, attaining the loftiest heights of passer rating, making hot-dog passes, doing more tricks than a circus seal between the stripes, and when he came into Foxboro for the Conference Championship, he was about as useful as a ballerina on pointe shoes on the field. Out of his element in a game played with true grit, Manning threw more passes to Patriots cornerback Ty Law than any of his actual receivers.

So what matters more? You do the math.

What we forget in all the self-flagellation over Game 7 was that the Yankees went on to lose to the Marlins in the World Series. We can flatter ourselves that the exhaustion and letdown following the ALCS was a factor, but the truth of the matter is that the Marlins played ugly, scrappy, nasty baseball. They played "small ball", they put a 21-year-old baby on the mound for a complete game (can you imagine the sabermetrics schizophrenia over such a move being made in Boston?), and they won. Maybe it wasn't Peyton Manning in the playoffs. Maybe it wasn't even the Yankees of yesteryear. Maybe it wasn't Game 6 in 1975. But they accomplished what we couldn't.

Honestly, I have to say I'm happy with the way things worked out last night. Don't get me wrong--I'm more than a little concerned that Keith Foulke has played in 8 out of the last 9 games for the Sox, and worried that by the time we really need him in a closing role, he'll be either unavailable, hurt or useless--but I'm working fiercely hard to find my Zen. Because we won. Without Trot. Without Nomar. Without Manny or Ortizzle or Mueller hitting like themselves. Without spectacular catches. Without pure, technical, beautiful, fundamental baseball prowess.

Despite it all, we won. As a Patriots fan, I can tell you that bodes well.

The Islamic fanatics planned to sit all around the ground to cause maximum carnage.

They had already bought the tickets for various positions in the stadium, cops revealed last night.

But armed cops foiled the horrific plot - which could have killed thousands watching Manchester United's home game against Liverpool on Saturday - in a series of dawn raids yesterday.

Ten people were arrested after a massive surveillance operation involving British anti-terror units and American authorities.

A police source said: "The plot involved several individual bombers in separate parts of the stadium.

"If successful, any such attack would have caused absolute carnage. Thousands of people could have been killed."

The planned attack would have had an instant global impact as the game is being televised worldwide.

I know that even in being publicized as a plan, this terrorist plot has accomplished at least one objective: striking fear into the mind. But I can't help but get the shakes when I think of the kind of carnage that could have been wrought on worldwide television, during what is supposed to be a cultural celebration--a sporting event.

Under the Taliban regime, the old soccer stadium was turned into an execution ground. This is what al-Qaeda meant to accomplish here, on British soil.

Whatever the plight of Middle Eastern nations, whatever the moral high ground Muslim martyrs may have concerning the Palestinian plight or the desperate poverty of many of their countries, is rendered moot when the only influence they seek on a Western world they see as having failed them is carnage and infinite cruelty.

Whether or not the war in Iraq was wrong, blowing up tens of thousands of soccer fans in Manchester will accomplish nothing, will make them nothing but worse than Bush or Blair or any of the Western leaders they blame for the chaos of the Middle East.

Still, who's right and who's wrong is a fairly moot point as well when people are murdered so violently. And I can't help but think that if terrorists wanted to strike in similar fashion in North America, there are no places more ripe for such an attack than the hallowed Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park.

Well, we found our ace...and I'm a believer...

Pedro Martinez is an artist. Watching him last night didn't give me the same visceral thrill of watching most athletes--the Tom Bradys and Curt Schillings and Mannys of the world. It was something much more refined and subtle than that.

Don't get me wrong, I don't know much about pitching. I couldn't tell you a cutter from a slider from a changeup. But I know unfettered grace when I see it, and last night, it was on the pitcher's mound for seven innings at the Toronto Skydome.

That's why I say Pedro's an artist. He works batters the way Michaelangelo worked paint. Inside, outside, up the middle--as they put it on the post-game show, he had people "trying to hit on marbles" which I thought was a beautiful phrase.

He doesn't have that heat anymore. He has to lean a lot harder on his off-speed pitches instead of blow-by fastballs. He's visibly older, heavier, than in his prime. He moves slower, and has among the awkwardest postures I've ever seen, elbows tucked back, shoulders heaved backwards, forearms held awkwardly by the hips, even when he stands still.

But artists ripen with age. The higher their handicaps, the more heroic their feats of mastery.

So, the velocity is hanging in the mid 80's on Pedro Martinez. He doesn't have that heat anymore. He's not the god he used to be. Now he's just a man with a gift from heaven, adding bravery and determination to the mix.

Statcounter C2F

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